Part of the classic Kraftwerk line-up that wowed Bowie and kickstarted hip hop, the RDS-bound Wolfgang Flür is still making wonderfully innovative music.

Before accepting Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter’s offer to join the pre-international breakthrough Kraftwerk – that came a year later with Autobhan - Flür had been a member of Dusseldorf’s answer to the Fab Vier, The Beathovens.

“They were the first amateur band that I founded with my schoolmates,” Wolfgang tells Hot Press. “We covered The Beatles and other songs we heard on our mono radio every Saturday afternoon from 4pm on Radio Luxembourg. My favourite album then was The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. It provided the accompanying melody and atmosphere to me falling in love for the first time, aged 17, to Brigitte!”

My perception of Kraftwerk changed a few years back when I discovered lines like "Chain reaction and mutation, contaminated population” (‘Radioactivity’) and “I’m your slave, I’m your worker” (‘The Robots’) are being darkly intoned in the German equivalent of a thick Cork accent. In other words, they’re not as unrelentingly serious as us non-Teutons think they are.

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